First of I am new to this forum so apologies if this is posted in the wrong place.

Iím currently a Business Information Technology student, researching how viable a privacy-by-design hosting service would be, currently Iím in contact with several cryptographers to find out whether this is can technically be done.

I have been looking at costing recently and found surprisingly little information on both the web and university databases. Would anyone on here be able to provide a rough idea of start up costs, basing the size of the company on ďHostingUK dot netĒ . What would be recommended buying vs leasing. As its research there isnít a budget, however I would like to try to stick to the example provided above.

Cryptography is mathematically expensive for CPUs to perform. So if your harddrives are encrypted and your traffic is also encrypted it will not scale well and will not follow any of the models that a normal host follows.

i.e. maximise performance with memory caching etc, as that would be insecure.

You will need to be able to explain to your customers why your service are so much more expensive than traditional, but secure hosting.

Maybe a further explanation of what it is exactly that you are offering may help in getting a less vague answer.